Let’s sort out the migration mess

14 March 2007

Austen Ivereigh says that illegal immigration is both a symptom and a cause — of British economic success. The dead hand of the state is getting it wrong, as usual: time for a total rethink

Many of them have been here since the 1990s. They are part of local networks of new friends and church congregations. Although educated and able, anxious to contribute and build new lives, while in the system they have been prevented from working and humiliated by handouts; after their refusals, they lose state support but still cannot work legally, and are forced to sign on each month so that the authorities know where they are in case they ever get round to deporting them — an extreme statistical improbability, as it happens, but the ever-present threat is enough to reduce many of them to psychological jelly.

No wonder, like Abdul, an articulate 34-year-old Kenyan, they ‘go underground’. By the time his claim was turned down eight years ago he was 25 and had been in the UK for five years; he had a diploma in computer studies, and had begun a university course in business and computing. While working in a Burger King to earn the money to continue studying, he married. Now he and his wife have three children, and both work; she part-time, Abdul as a caretaker — a job far below his skill level. He has been here for 14 years, yet lives with the fear that one day his employers will scrutinise his papers and he will be removed, forced to abandon his wife and children. Assuming that doesn’t happen, he won’t be able to attend his father’s funeral.

While churches and NGOs protest about the inhuman treatment of decent people cast into limbo, Nazi youths roam Glasgow housing estates picking on scapegoats, and John Reid appeases tabloids by impersonating Alf Garnett. But everyone avoids the brutal truth: almost all are here to stay. The immigration minister, Liam Byrne, recently announced with pride that for the first time in years the deportation rate — 25,000 a year, or one every 27 minutes — has exceeded fresh claims for asylum. But what he does not say is that at this rate it would take 25 years forcibly to remove illegal immigrants, and cost billions of pounds — all assuming, of course, that no one else applies for asylum or overstays their visa between now and 2042.